Instead of carving marble or forging bronze, Anish Kapoor sculpts with materials that can’t be held like mirrored reflections, the laws of optics and space around your body.

Don’t expect Kapoor’s sense-rattling sculptures to sit on pedestals in a museum.

Look instead at the sensual bump extruding from the gallery wall or gaze into gleaming orifices Kapoor cuts into it. Poke your head up the red mushroom-shaped blob leaning against a wall or see a thousand pixilated facets of yourself in “Hexagon Mirror.”

Best known for his monumental steel “Cloud Gate” in Chicago’s Millennial Park, Kapoor earned an international fame by creating genre-busting art that fused sculpture, architecture and philosophic inquiry.

Rather than carve representational figures from stone, he gives form to essential conundrums, such as distinguishing between self and object, not through sculpted works but by incorporating empty space into them.

In the first American museum survey of his work in 15 years, the India native transforms the West Gallery into a metaphysical fun house that subverts viewers’ preconceptions about traditional sculpture.

Created between 1980 and 2007, Kapoor’s sculptures are arranged mostly along the walls of an 8,000-square-foot gallery that comes to resemble an oversized playground designed by Lewis Carroll. Almost half the pieces could be loosely described as mirrors, apertures or the sort of sculpted rabbit hole that carried Alice to a Wonderland of illogic where comfortable expectations don’t apply.

Describing his work, Kapoor said he’s fascinated a simple construction of “paint and wax” and other materials “has another reality.”
“I want to know the secret behind the magic,” he said.

Opening the show last week, Kapoor said his work reflects the modern physics discovery that “dark matter and non-matter” make up the fundamental stuff of the universe.

“I’m interested in the way art and the artist can sidestep the real and make it more real,” he said. “It’s real but not real.”

Standing before his 32-foot-long distorting “S-Curve” mirror, Kapoor said a sculpture’s impact on viewers “extends beyond its space.”

Representing nearly three decades of Kapoor’s career, this groundbreaking show reveals the increasing ambition, complexity and profundity of his art.

ICA Chief Curator Nicholas Baume said the exhibit “tests the limits of our perceptions and boundaries. ... These works represent 30 years of extraordinary invention. It is a mid-career survey with more to come,” he said.

He predicted visitors would be so intrigued by the way Kapoor’s work “chases the boundaries and limits of the gallery’s space ... they couldn’t walk through without stopping.”

“His sculptures marry a modernist sense of pure materiality with a fascination for the manipulation of form and the perception of space,” he said. “It presents a body of work that deals with materials and concepts that explode into something very different.”

Baume urged viewers to “engage” Kapoor’s sculptures from all sides to understand how he incorporates empty space into them.

“Reality isn’t a beginning and an end. The world unfolds as you move through it,” he said.

Born in 1954 in Bombay, Kapoor moved to England as a teenager and studied at Hornsey School of Art and Chelsea School of Art Design. In the early 1980s he gained fame sculpting shapes often coated with colored pigments from his native land. When he later cut holes and cavities into stone works, critics spoke of his growing interest in fundamental physical and spiritual dichotomies.

More recently, Kapoor’s sculptures have grown significantly larger while including mirrors that reflect and distort viewers’ perceptions.

Even if your idea of great sculpture is Frederick Remington’s galloping cowboys, don’t let Kapoor’s highfalutin reputation discourage you from seeing a show that’s funky and philosophical but never so abstract it’s not fun.

Like most pieces on display, this exhibit can be enjoyed on multiple levels.

Two separate works called “1000 Names” reveal Kapoor’s evolving use of materials. Completed in 1980, one resembles a red drill bit thrusting skyward through the floor while the other comprises piles and squares of reds and yellows.